kay hymowitz says that males in their 20s and 30s prefer to put off adulthood while women partially driven by their biological clocks, are as driven as ever. she said this phenomenon has negative implications for society. this event was hosted by the manhattan institute in new york city. it is about 40 minutes.

>> many of you have seen the movie i'm going to be discussing before and those who haven't might want to get out of little bit more. [laughter] this is a shot from sex in the city. sex in the city has most of you know it's a is a television series as well as the subject up to movies or the title of two movies. i want to draw your attention to one fact about them that has been much less commented on. this is probably the highest educated group ever to appear on television. we have a harvard educated corporate lawyer. we have a educated art gallery manager of public relations consultant and a journalist -- well, a sex columnist. they represent what i call the new girl order.

now let's go to the next image. [laughter] more of the same, and more of the same. could this be the new boy order? i call them a child-man, admittedly these characters are on the order of caricature, but their general persona has gained significant traction in contemporary culture. this persona says i am not a man, i am not a boy, i am something in between. they are not necessarily slackers. sometimes people make that mistake in thinking that they are. some of them go to law school or work on wall street or may have no clue what to do, but they are partial we know two movies and television shows with car chases, and they are partial to

beer and video games, frat house pranks and jokes. we will be coming back to the child-man in just a little bit. girls of the new girl order and the child-man are demographically covered. for one thing, there is something in between adolescence and full-fledged adults. some sociologists and psychologists refer to this age group as emerging adults for reasons that will become clear. i preferred the term pre-adult. what is the pre-adults? pre-adults are single young middle-class people in their 20s and early 30s. they are in graduate school or moving between jobs or tutoring high school for the s.a.t.'s while writing screenplays and they're all fours or the intense 12 hour day early stages of their career. pre-adults are almost always living in cities, austin texas,

portland, seattle, chicago d.c. and of course new york where they get to enjoy the sushi and indian restaurants, crowded ours, and gems, nail salons and cafés and the like. ordinary as it seems to us today, pre-adulthood is something very new. up until recently the central fact about a woman in her 20s and early 30s was that she was a wife and mother. that was the case whether she was a 23-year-old from ming china or a 26-year-old and america. in fact, most people in their 20s were not single and if they were, they were not living with roommates in williamsburg, brooklyn or dupont circle and drinking shots of mimosas with other pre-adults on weekends. they were married and they had children and they often had cars whose oil needed changing. now let's look at the numbers.

in 1970 the average age of marriage for men was 23. and for women, a little less than 21. today, it is 26 and 28 but that is a little bit misleading actually. because the numbers for college-educated and even those with some graduate school education are considerably higher. for women, the average age is about 27. for women with a masters or professional degree, it is about 30. now this means that we have a historically high percentage of single people in their 20s and early 30s. this gives you a little bit of an idea. now, unlike almost any other decade we are looking at here, the majority of 25-year-olds are

single. i wasn't able to get a chart on 30-year-olds, but the trends are the same. an ever-increasing number of people who are single at 30 and the numbers among college-educated is considerably higher. now, what does this mean? a lot of people say to me while it is good to wait to get varied and many ways it is and we can talk about that, but it has a significant social impact. tens of millions more young men and women happily free of mortgages, spouses and childcare bills, a new stage of life has been borne. sociologist love this kind of thing. they call it a new demographic. hollywood also loves new demographics and by this 1990s television situation comedy side of the suburban kitchen and into the city. and their main characters were

no longer moms, dads and stepdad's and the kids. they were pre-adults with names every american under fire the five knows chandler rachel jerry elaine, george and let's not forget carrie, samantha and charlotte ayn rand up. so this was the change as hollywood was observing it that was happening by the early '90s. what is causing bring adulthood? i see the cause for it is mostly economic. in the new knowledge economy do have to think, compute, analyzing you need to go to college and grad school. in 1960, nearly 8% of americans had a bachelors degree. for that matter, nearly 60% of americans lacked a high school diploma. today, close to 30% of americans have a college degree. it even more significant between

1985 and 2007, grad school enrollment jumped a remarkable 67%. everyone will tell you education leads to the sorts of jobs that give you more money, more benefits, more stability and more prestige. these are good reasons to spend years in a library or lab and put off a steady paycheck until 22 or if grad school is in the cards, 27 plus. but there is another crucial reason that the knowledge economy has created this new stage of life. this economy is incredibly complex. it takes a long time to figure it out. in 1970 when i was graduating from a private liberal arts college, brandeis as christina mentioned, my friends considered about five different sorts of careers that would be both interesting to them and inconsistent with their lifestyle or status expectations. just about all of them became doctors, lawyers, professors, psychologists or journalists.

here i'm going to give you a list of some of the jobs that today's college grads can consider, jobs that did not exist when her parents were her age. here we go. web designer videogame developer diversity administrator video producer systems analyst software engineer at data communications analysts biotech researcher geneticist contract specialist, i could go on and on. then you can also bring into the mix the tens of thousands of administrative technical and strategic jobs at companies like google, yahoo! serious radio, microsoft, apple starbucks hbo comedy central and any of the other 300 plus cable networks now entertaining us every day. even during the great recession americans spend considerably more an entertainment than they did 40 years ago. that means more jobs for

artists, actors comedians directors documentary filmmakers, video game creators and -- developers and just to give you an example, you may not know what this is. this is one of the most popular apps for the iphone. it is called i.d. or and if you scroll this into your iphone you can make it look like you are drinking a beer. if you hold it up and down notice how it looks like you are chugging when you turn it towards your mouth. it is one of the most popular iphone applications as i said on the market. it has the virtue of demonstrating to things. the variety and strangeness of the knowledge economy. this little gadget has made its inventor a very wealthy man.

what did he tell his parents he wanted to be when he grew up? hard to imagine. [laughter] it is the second thing that demonstrates the knowledge economy and its associated affluence tends to reinforce the youth culture. in this case the culture is dedicated to young men. now the jobs that are available in the knowledge economy are not just a paycheck. they can be gratifying. fun, exciting and even glamorous. young people, men and women, are now in a position to ask the question that human beings have never been able to consider realistically, what should i do with my life? it is a hard question and it can take a long time to answer. in simpler economies young people simply followed that clearly marked pathways that lead them to a trade or craft or wage labor or if they were very lucky to professional jobs. in a pre-adults just graduating college on the other hand is

likely he wrote in a hitchcock movie. he or she is pushed off the bus in an unmarked crossroads in the middle of the desert. which way to go? a lot of today's careers are mysterious. how to become a documentary filmmaker, a grant officer for an international foundation, not chipra nor? now i mentioned a little while ago that one of the major reasons people are taking longer to grow up these days into mary is the reason for the existence of adulthood for joey and monica and ross and rachel is that so many more individuals are going to college and graduate school to make it in the knowledge economy. now that statement was actually a little misleading. to be more accurate, more women are going to college and graduate school. the growth in both college and graduate degrees has come almost entirely from the female half of the population. after 1970, the fraction of men with four-year college degrees in the united states stole the

percentage of women with those degrees meanwhile exploded. i have got the the slide to show you to give you a sense of this. notice the projection. i don't know how seriously we should take these projections but that is kind of a scary looking scissors right there. not surprising -- on the the graduate-level too i should mention women are also outdoing men. there was an increase in full-time graduate students among men, about 32% between 1997 and 2007 compared to a 63% increase for female graduate students. now, not surprisingly given these numbers pre-adult women, single childless women now own more than men and a great majority of american mid and

larger sized cities. that is just an extraordinary statement right there. never been through before. what accounts for women success? how do we explain the coming of the new girl order? most people will define the answer as feminism, and obviously that is a big piece of it but i don't think it is the whole story. interestingly enough, countries like south korea and japan never had an influential feminist movement and are seeing similar success among women in school. i would add two other factors. the first is what barbara whitehead has called the girl project. by the 1990s, and that seems to be a real dividing.in my research is the change in the culture i'm describing here. by it the 1990s and actually starting even in the 80's, parents were engaging in a new kind of child or rather girl rearing.

they were intent on creating a new breed of girls. self-confidence, ambitious -- that is the wrong slide. there we go, girl power. they were intent on creating a new breed of girl, self-confident, ambitious and even as some people put it a little cake cast. girls have their own little league teams they're there on television and movie shows, their own scholarships. the insistent message to girls, go forth and achieve. the other reason for women success i believe as changes in the economy that i talked about earlier. these changes were very friendly to women. for the most part up until the 1970s, women look for employment for the simple reason that they and their families needed the money. before that time, this is what work went for -- meant for women. this is not to say that there weren't women who wanted to become scientists, doctors,

lawyers and the like and discrimination didn't keep them from doing so, but most middle-class women who began scanning the help wanted ads after the revolution were doing so at precisely the moment the knowledge economy was coming into being. the preindustrial and industrial economy relied on physical strength and endurance, or have there were women who could be meant equal in this deal mills on the auto binds and in mines building bridges and the like, but there weren't many. either 1980s, machines became more productive. communications and transportation cheaper and more efficient and american manufacturing jobs began their story declined. this was in many respects bad news is most of you know for america's working class particularly working-class men, but i happen to have been somewhat good news for women. manufacturing jobs may have diminished but consumer goods were becoming cheaper. these goods needed to be

designed, planned, packaged, marketed, advertised analyzed and sold as well as to be capitalized, regulated and legalized. i described a startling expansion of careers for people in the design field. is especially the case of the internet where we have come to expect information to be presented in visual form. but there is also communications. the publishing business is now largely a female occupation and so is journalism. women hold a large majority of degrees in journalism. they are over half of news anchors and more are a percentage of news reporters. they are two-thirds television producers including over half of the executive producers. in fact women now account for over half of all workers in management and professional occupations. so there we have design, journalism, public relations, marketing, event planning, managing. these are jobs for people who

can communicate persuade charm and multitask who score high on empathy, intuition, communication skills, planning and relationship building. in older economies this may have been what were promised women but in the knowledge economy, we have this. when i went to look for images of women in the workplace, i got lots of very smiling women sitting at their offices and at their desks so they must know something i don't know. [laughter] among knowledge economy pre-adults women are they first sex and this is something as i said before that is new to human civilization. i know it sounds like an exaggeration. it is not. let us return therefore to the child-man, the young single dude not child but not adult either. i see him as the result of four

huge shifts. first is pre-adulthood. a decade or more of single life devoted to work and self-exploration. women also spent years in pre-adulthood, the single years of the 20s and 30s but here is the difference. women have advantage miserable as it sometimes makes them come up knowing about biological women. the large majority of women and men say they want children and that is what the surveys consistently say. but for women whose fertility begins to decline by the time they are 30, that means that they will not be able to play or work without serious distraction for very long. even those who are unsure whether they will have children know that the decisional bone imposes boundaries on their pre-adulthood. men don't have depressing limits. they can take their time, and they do. the second for shaping the child-man is a highly segmented

and uncensored media environment. in the past and men have never paid much attention to television and magazines. the media in turn had trouble figuring out how to reach that younger male demographic. by the mid-90s, they found each other and fell in love. we got maksim magazine, cable news networks, hollywood movies, also the formula for attracting young males, car crashes and embarrassing bodily fluids and exposed female body parts. one of the most successful guide cable channels is called spike. it came on the air in 2003 with reruns of star trek and the original show called détente in which contestants try to detect the differences and two identical pictures of nearly naked women. i would try to find an image to show you but i would have gotten kicked out of the harvard class.

the third reason for the child-man, we have got the two that i mentioned so far -- the third reason for the child-man is female independence. the young man reaches the age where in any other period of history he would be defining himself as potential husband and father with the understanding that he has a clear and important social role. today, provide her husband and's are optional with reproductive technology have women so choose they can simply buy and forget about the man who delivered it. in while, young men have seen fathers and uncles discarded by wives, cast out of their homes and separated from their children. no wonder they look around at the culture, shrug into their own thing. here is my final reason for the appearance of the child-man. we have seen a general cultural ambivalence and that is that vast, about man. by the 1990s the entire

culture as we just saw became a you go girl cheering section. it would be nice to say that americans love both their boys and girls equally, but there was reason for men to suspect otherwise. you may notice, some of you have may have heard this voice -- girls rule, boys drool. this is a popular phrase that went on girls backpacks and lunch boxes and so one and so forth. the other one says not all men are annoying. some are dead. not even funny. so advertisers and screenwriters at the same time for giving us a long line of low iq television jabs. we had homer simpson, ray romano, tim allen and the drumbeat from the popular culture saying men are dumb, unfeeling, incompetent and men don't -- women don't really need them.

the same time the qualities of character that minute needed to play their traditional role, fortitude, courage, competence fidelity were becoming obsolete and even a little embarrassing. there is a new term out that his gain some traction. it determines -- a combination of man and explaining. according to the urban dictionary a popular source of trendy terms, it is what men do in order to "dominate the conversation to make statements that are not based on facts assuming that people will believe and agree with him because he is a male." so once again this attack on the idea of the authoritative mail. some men decided they had better cool down the masculine personality. they adopted youthful playfulness and hesitancy. they seem to say, i i am not that man. i am a guy, and our products low

to commit, uncertain guide. just the other day i stumbled across this post from a popular female blogger. she called the posts ask me out on a date. and she continued, don't ask me to hang out with you. don't asked me if i am free sometime on friday night and say you will be in touch that night to see what is up. don't asked me if i'm interested in getting a coffee sometime. asked me out on a date. so you get that from a lot of young women today saying on the one hand they want this kind of equality that they have gotten from the schools and the teachers and with their parents, but they want something a little bit different when it comes to dating. the child-man then is the lost son of a host of economic and cultural changes or goat the demographic shift i called

pre-adulthood, feminism, the wild west of our new media and the shrugging iffyness on the subject of husbands and fathers. as well as a general cultural ambivalence about man. now this finally leaves us with a question that might've occurred to some of you in this room. why are we spending our lunch hour at the harvard club discussing détente and i-beer? in case you forgot, we are here under the auspices of the manhattan institute, the influential public policy think-tank that it tends to subjects like fiscal and tax policy, to reform education and policing, not the dating frustrations of single career women. as it happens i had an answer to that question. the trends i'm describing ode well for the family. i think we are looking at more family breakdown, which in turn increases government spending and dependency which in turn leads to new jersey and

california as well as more general decline in skills and innovations in future citizens. this is not in a big issue before now as many of you know. hopefully because you read my previous book, "marriage and caste america." college women may talk like they live in this post marital -- like they can take a leave of marriage and children but compared to their low income counterparts they lived as my friend amy wax has put it, like it is the 1950s. they wait to have children until they married. they generally stay married. divorce rates among the college-educated have declined substantially since 1980. a large majority of children growing up with college-educated mothers are living and live it to land and doing quite well. that is not the case for the less educated. 40% of children today are born to unmarried mothers and almost all of those mothers are low income and lacking a college degree.

they are not members of the new girl order. divorce dhume is far more common among low income than college-educated women and men. at least that is the way it has panned out so far. i don't see how that can continue. a big part of the reason for family breakdown at the lower end of the income scale is the dearth of marriageable males. that is, men who are women sequels are better in terms of earning, reliability and competence. remember 57% of grads are women, college graduates are women. it is not a promising ratio if you are hoping to marry and have children, as most women do. now and niels bohr once said that prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. but, i'm going to end today by making for predictions. first, i predict we will see some more women marrying down

and i use that word was like quotation marks, but not much. were reasons that are deeply rooted in our biology and culture. women want to marry higher or at least very equal status males. or have said is wide marriage between more educated women and less educated men tend to break up at fairly high rates. second, i predict more educated women remaining single and childless. third, predict significantly more educated mothers giving up the fight of finding a marriageable husband and deciding to go to the bank. fourth, as men look around and see lower expectations from the culture around them, we will see more child-man. finally, and feel free to argue with me here, i predict more sales for i-beer. thank you very much. [applause]

>> thanks. thanks kay. we have time for some questions, and we do have a microphone i think, so if you could wait for the mic to be delivered and identify yourself that would be great. we will start over here on the left. >> kay this is your friend amy wax. i.t. chip in law school, and i wanted to ask you about a phenomenon that i have actually recently looked into, which is that men feel overwhelmingly dominating and certain precincts of power and influence so take for example what i call journals of opinion. if you look at the peer review books, the new republic and all those sorts of publications on the right and the left, "the weekly standard," the people who are writing for them are overwhelmingly male, and that is

chirla of the 20-something to 30-something generation. there is a whole body of social science that suggests that even among college graduates in up men are far more informed. they know more about a range of topics. they are more curious. i would just ask you to comment on that, if you think that will continue? >> well, i do, actually. a couple of things come to mind. ..

>> keep that in mind. i don't think we solved, i don't know that we can solve the conflict for women between having children -- having a family and getting ahead in the workplace. there's always going to be some conflict there. but to get more precisely to your question, amy, i think that women, you know, we get into these essentialist arguments which i'm fairly comfortable with, but in general, i see women as less aggressive in terms of debate. you know, i've never looked, actually, at the numbers of debaters, and i know that the -- among -- in the schools these days, they are pushing to make quite a bit. i've never really looked to see

how those numbers break out. but i wouldn't be surprised to find the champion debaters are male. why that is? you know, it has something to do with the kind of aggression and focus on facts that i think are required for that kind of -- that kind of debate. i do believe it's probably an essentialist reason. >> okay. over here. >> ed thompson with the irand institute. your theme seems to be economics and cultural influences and so forth. but you haven't mentioned anything about early education. i'm interested in progressive education. i used the term in multiculturalism, you know the drill. i can see you nodding.

from the reading that i've done on the subject, and i'm not an educator, cog innocent of development, which is thwarted by the education system which has to be dominated by women. what's your take on progressive education? what i'm trying to say is all of the young adults, our should be adults where children are starts somewhere and they grow up with pseudoself-esteem and so forth. could you address that please? >> yeah, i think christina has written about primary education and the way that it is unfriendly to boys. for one thing, we've seen a big decline or big transformation in the kinds of books that students, young students are being asked to read. you won't find the adventure

books anymore, or not very much. the kinds of books that might have appealed to boys. i remember reviewing a book some time ago about the change in textbooks. history textbooks. and the writer there said that if you were to look at the updated textbooks, you know, postseminis -- postfeminist textbooks, it would sound like it was entirely colonized by women, actually girls, girls and their participants. so there's no question that there's that going on. you know, there has been this

feminization. it is possibility true that boys need more structure than girls because they are more restless, physical lyresless. because they also seem to like competitive, game-like education. i've heard from a number of teachers if you can arrange things so your child, your boy, knows that if he reads a certain numbers of books he gets a certain kind of reward, they like that kind of thing a lot. so i suppose that inas farso fas progressive education has been to the disadvantage of boys. >> right in the middle there. >> bob. junior academic. i'm going to get you to change the focus and look at the word physiology here.

i saw a poll from japan that said that something like 35% of young japanese males have no longer any interest in sex. they are not pursuing women, no interest, that's remarkable. the other thing that i've heard -- for the life of me -- >> bob, i would like to know what question they asked those men. >> well, it's interesting, many of the men are extreme versions of what you are talking about. i understand that in japan, many of them never leave the house, they play video games all the time. i've also heard, i can't track it down, declining testas roan levels. many men got married because they were tired of hunting and gathering, they wanted to become farmers.

[laughter] >> it's true. a lot of men it's the regularity. i was wondering whether or not you know the business about these creatures simply losing interest in sex, or getting it off of the pornography off of the web, or some other way, and that physical aspect maybe a critical element to add to your list? >> dale, you know, i have want heard about a loss of interest in sex among boys. what i have read about and i think it's worth taking very seriously is the predominance of porn in their lives. this has become a profound new way of spending your time. for young men. whenwhen -- we published than et of my book in the wall street journal about ten days ago. i got a number of letters from young men who said i've got porn. i don't want to bother with the

real women. and certainly you hear more than that, you hear women complaining of boys who have some strange ideas about what -- how their sexual encounter should go. ideas they have learned from watching so much porn. i do think that's a factor in what i'm describing. >> lionel. i taught at rutgers for too lock. an observation about the issue about why girls do better than boys and uniting with your notion about reproduction, men and women, certainly women articulate a sense of wanting

children. my impression, and i think poured out by the data, is that when women are doing well at school, they are studying for two. any sensible young women knows if she's planning on prince charming to swoop her up, care for her forever in a guilded carriage, she's likely to prove naive beyond telling. so these young women understand that if they have got an education, they can take care of themselves and as so many of them end up doing, take care of a child or two children. so it seems to me the biological part of what is constituted male or female has to be given a technical salience. otherwise, it's a technical issue, quite profound. >> absolutely. i can add one little anecdote

for that. there's a study that i saw that showed that low-income women who are single mothers often go to community college after their children are born. and they almost always say it's because of the child, for the child. so i think you are quite right. >> are we -- just have time for one more question. why don't we go way to the back? yes, two related questions. first is how do you see this generation of 20 something ideas aficionados evolving into their 30s, 40s with and beyond. second is there any other country you are aware of that is more advanced than the united states in terms of the phenomenon? [laughter] >> i -- look -- i think -- most young men will get into their

30s, look around, and decide, okay, you know, it's time to settle down. maybe it won't be until they are 40, or, you know, maybe it'll even be a little older. i spoke to a young woman the other day who is in her late 30s and single and would very much like to settle down. we told me of dating a 40-something guy who is now looking at himself in the mirror and going i see wrinkles. you know? she said there is a biological clock for men too. it's just a different clock. and that maybe true. you know, one thing -- one question to ask is whether the men and women for that matter who have spent so much time on their own and taking care of themselves and no one else whether they will adapt easily to marriage. i think that's an open question. as for other countries -- this s -- the success of women in

school as i mention is something that we're seeing all over this place. that's why i call it the new girl order. all over the developed world in asia, in japan, korea, china, and eastern europe, you know, everywhere where people going to universities, girls are doing better. now how that's going to play out in the various countries has -- you know, i think it's really going to depend on individual cultures and how they deal with this. but i think that we will be seeing a collapse in fertility in a lot of the countries as we already have. >> thank you, kay. thank you all for coming. the book is "manning up." [applause] [applause]

>> we are here talking about james robbins about his latest book "this time we win." >> it's a book about the vietnam war, which was an outstanding victory, and was reported as a defeat, and has gone down in history as a defeat. the purpose of the book is to try to clear that up. >> how do you go about that task? or how did you? >> well, going back to the original documents and declassified, talking about people that were involved and reviewing the case that was made that it was a defeat, and trying to show how some of the points that were made about ted were

actually wrong. >> did you explain how the media at the time and i guess over history have gotten it wrong? >> in the wrong of the book it was contemporary wars like iraq and afghanistan, they use it as an analogy. i start with quotes from contemporary, and go back and retrace it. >> can you list the specific thing that's your inspiration for getting started on this? >> other than my publisher wanted it? i've been studying counterinsurgency for 30 years. i've never people who were involved. one of my friends was an advisor to lyndon johnson. it's just been in the background for a long time. it was a good opportunity to write about it. >> can you tell us what your next project might be? >> i'm looking at a variety of things. something on the 1862